annals of mathematics
manifold destiny
A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
BY Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber
O n the evening of June 20th, sev-
eral hundred physicists, including
a Nobel laureate, assembled in an audi-
torium at the Friendship Hotel in Bei-
jing for a lecture by the Chinese math-
ematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late
nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in
his twenties, he had made a series of
breakthroughs that helped launch the
string-theory revolution in physics and
earned him, in addition to a Fields
Medal—the most coveted award in
mathematics—a reputation in both
disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled
technical power.
Yau had since become a professor of
mathematics at Harvard and the direc-
tor of mathematics institutes in Beijing
and Hong Kong, dividing his time be-
tween the United States and China.
His lecture at the Friendship Hotel was
part of an international conference on
string theory, which he had organized
with the support of the Chinese gov-
ernment, in part to promote the coun-
try’s recent advances in theoretical
physics. (More than six thousand stu-
dents attended the keynote address,
which was delivered by Yau’s close
friend Stephen Hawking, in the Great
Hall of the People.) The subject of
Yau’s talk was something that few in
his audience knew much about: the
Poincaré conjecture, a century-old co-
nundrum about the characteristics of
three-dimensional spheres, which, be-
cause it has important implications for
mathematics and cosmology and be-
cause it has eluded all attempts at solu-
tion, is regarded by mathematicians as
a holy grail.
Yau, a stocky man of fifty-seven,
stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and
black-rimmed glasses and, with his
hands in his pockets, described how
two of his students, Xi-Ping Zhu and
Huai-Dong Cao, had completed a
proof of the Poincaré conjecture a few
weeks earlier. “I’m very positive about
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006
Zhu and Cao’s work,” Yau said. “Chi-
nese mathematicians should have every
reason to be proud of such a big success
in completely solving the puzzle.” He
said that Zhu and Cao were indebted
to his longtime American collaborator
Richard Hamilton, who deserved most
of the credit for solving the Poincaré.
He also mentioned Grigory Perelman,
a Russian mathematician who, he ac-
knowledged, had made an important
contribution. Nevertheless, Yau said,
“in Perelman’s work, spectacular as it
is, many key ideas of the proofs are
sketched or outlined, and complete de-
tails are often missing.” He added, “We
would like to get Perelman to make
comments. But Perelman resides in
St. Petersburg and refuses to commu-
nicate with other people.”
For ninety minutes, Yau discussed
some of the technical details of his stu-
dents’ proof. When he was finished, no
one asked any questions. That night,
however, a Brazilian physicist posted a
report of the lecture on his blog. “Looks
like China soon will take the lead also
in mathematics,” he wrote.
G rigory Perelman is indeed reclu-
sive. He left his job as a researcher
at the Steklov Institute of Mathemat-
ics, in St. Petersburg, last December;
he has few friends; and he lives with his
mother in an apartment on the out-
skirts of the city. Although he had
never granted an interview before, he
was cordial and frank when we visited
him, in late June, shortly after Yau’s
conference in Beijing, taking us on a
long walking tour of the city. “I’m look-
ing for some friends, and they don’t
have to be mathematicians,” he said.
The week before the conference, Perel-
man had spent hours discussing the
Poincaré conjecture with Sir John M.
Ball, the fifty-eight-year-old president
of the International Mathematical
Union, the discipline’s influential pro-
fessional association. The meeting,
which took place at a conference center
in a stately mansion overlooking the
Neva River, was highly unusual. At the
end of May, a committee of nine prom-
inent mathematicians had voted to
award Perelman a Fields Medal for his
work on the Poincaré, and Ball had
gone to St. Petersburg to persuade him
to accept the prize in a public ceremony
at the I.M.U.’s quadrennial congress, in
Madrid, on August 22nd.
The Fields Medal, like the Nobel
Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to
elevate science above national animos-
ities. German mathematicians were ex-
cluded from the first I.M.U. congress,
in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted
before the next one, the trauma it
caused led, in 1936, to the establish-
ment of the Fields, a prize intended to
be “as purely international and imper-
sonal as possible.”
However, the Fields Medal, which
is awarded every four years, to between
two and four mathematicians, is sup-
posed not only to reward past achieve-
ments but also to stimulate future re-
search; for this reason, it is given only
to mathematicians aged forty and
younger. In recent decades, as the num-
ber of professional mathematicians has
grown, the Fields Medal has become
increasingly prestigious. Only forty-
four medals have been awarded in
nearly seventy years—including three
for work closely related to the Poincaré
conjecture—and no mathematician has
ever refused the prize. Nevertheless,
Perelman told Ball that he had no in-
tention of accepting it. “I refuse,” he
said simply.
Over a period of eight months, be-
ginning in November, 2002, Perelman
posted a proof of the Poincaré on the
Internet in three installments. Like a
sonnet or an aria, a mathematical proof
pierre le-tan
has a distinct form and set of conven-
tions. It begins with axioms, or ac-
Grigory Perelman (right) says, “If the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed.” Shing-Tung Yau isn’t so sure.
cepted truths, and employs a series of
logical statements to arrive at a conclu-
sion. If the logic is deemed to be water-
tight, then the result is a theorem. Un-
like proof in law or science, which is
based on evidence and therefore subject
to qualification and revision, a proof
of a theorem is definitive. Judgments
about the accuracy of a proof are medi-
ated by peer-reviewed journals; to in-
sure fairness, reviewers are supposed to
be carefully chosen by journal editors,
and the identity of a scholar whose pa­
per is under consideration is kept se-
cret. Publication implies that a proof is
complete, correct, and original.
By these standards, Perelman’s proof
was unorthodox. It was astonishingly
brief for such an ambitious piece of
work; logic sequences that could have
been elaborated over many pages were
often severely compressed. Moreover,
the proof made no direct mention of
the Poincaré and included many ele-
gant results that were irrelevant to the
central argument. But, four years later,
at least two teams of experts had vetted
the proof and had found no signifi-
cant gaps or errors in it. A consensus
was emerging in the math community:
Perelman had solved the Poincaré.
Even so, the proof ’s complexity—and
Perelman’s use of shorthand in making
some of his most important claims—
made it vulnerable to challenge. Few
mathematicians had the expertise nec-
essary to evaluate and defend it.
“Should we halfheartedly try to relate?”
After giving a series of lectures on
the proof in the United States in 2003,
Perelman returned to St. Petersburg.
Since then, although he had continued
to answer queries about it by e-mail,
he had had minimal contact with col-
leagues and, for reasons no one under-
stood, had not tried to publish it. Still,
there was little doubt that Perelman,
who turned forty on June 13th, de-
served a Fields Medal. As Ball planned
the I.M.U.’s 2006 congress, he began
to conceive of it as a historic event.
More than three thousand mathemati-
cians would be attending, and King
Juan Carlos of Spain had agreed to pre-
side over the awards ceremony. The
I.M.U.’s newsletter predicted that the
congress would be remembered as “the
occasion when this conjecture became
a theorem.” Ball, determined to make
sure that Perelman would be there, de-
cided to go to St. Petersburg.
Ball wanted to keep his visit a se-
cret—the names of Fields Medal re-
cipients are announced officially at the
awards ceremony—and the conference
center where he met with Perelman
was deserted. For ten hours over two
days, he tried to persuade Perelman to
agree to accept the prize. Perelman, a
slender, balding man with a curly beard,
bushy eyebrows, and blue-green eyes,
listened politely. He had not spoken
English for three years, but he fluently
parried Ball’s entreaties, at one point
taking Ball on a long walk—one of
Perelman’s favorite activities. As he
summed up the conversation two weeks
later: “He proposed to me three alter-
natives: accept and come; accept and
don’t come, and we will send you the
medal later; third, I don’t accept the
prize. From the very beginning, I told
him I have chosen the third one.” The
Fields Medal held no interest for him,
Perelman explained. “It was completely
irrelevant for me,” he said. “Everybody
understood that if the proof is correct
then no other recognition is needed.”
P roofs of the Poincaré have been an-
nounced nearly every year since the
conjecture was formulated, by Henri
Poincaré, more than a hundred years
ago. Poincaré was a cousin of Raymond
Poincaré, the President of France dur-
ing the First World War, and one of
the most creative mathematicians of
the nineteenth century. Slight, myopic,
and notoriously absent-minded, he
conceived his famous problem in 1904,
eight years before he died, and tucked
it as an offhand question into the end
of a sixty-five-page paper.
Poincaré didn’t make much progress
on proving the conjecture. “Cette ques-
tion nous entraînerait trop loin” (“This
question would take us too far”), he
wrote. He was a founder of topology,
also known as “rubber-sheet geometry,”
for its focus on the intrinsic properties of
spaces. From a topologist’s perspective,
there is no difference between a bagel
and a coffee cup with a handle. Each has
a single hole and can be manipulated to
resemble the other without being torn
or cut. Poincaré used the term “mani-
fold” to describe such an abstract topo-
logical space. The simplest possible two-
dimensional manifold is the surface of a
soccer ball, which, to a topologist, is a
sphere—even when it is stomped on,
stretched, or crumpled. The proof that
an object is a so-called two-sphere, since
it can take on any number of shapes, is
that it is “simply connected,” meaning
that no holes puncture it. Unlike a soc-
cer ball, a bagel is not a true sphere. If
you tie a slipknot around a soccer ball,
you can easily pull the slipknot closed by
sliding it along the surface of the ball.
But if you tie a slipknot around a bagel
through the hole in its middle you can-
not pull the slipknot closed without
tearing the bagel.
 Two-dimensional manifolds were
well understood by the mid-nineteenth
century. But it remained unclear wheth­er
what was true for two dimensions was
also true for three. Poincaré proposed
that all closed, simply connected, three-
dimensional manifolds—those which
lack holes and are of finite extent—were
spheres. The conjecture was potentially
important for scientists studying the
largest known three-dimensional mani-
fold: the universe. Proving it mathemat-
ically, however, was far from easy. Most
attempts were merely embarrassing, but
some led to important mathematical
discoveries, including proofs of Dehn’s
Lemma, the Sphere Theorem, and the
Loop Theorem, which are now funda-
mental concepts in topology.
By the nineteen-sixties, topology
had become one of the most productive
areas of mathematics, and young topol-
ogists were launching regular attacks
on the Poincaré. To the astonishment
of most mathematicians, it turned out
that manifolds of the fourth, fifth, and
higher dimensions were more tractable
than those of the third dimension. By
1982, Poincaré’s conjecture had been
proved in all dimensions except the
third. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics
Institute, a private foundation that pro-
motes mathematical research, named
the Poincaré one of the seven most im-
portant outstanding problems in math-
ematics and offered a million dollars to
anyone who could prove it.
“My whole life as a mathematician
has been dominated by the Poincaré
conjecture,” John Morgan, the head
of the mathematics department at
Columbia University, said. “I never
thought I’d see a solution. I thought
nobody could touch it.”
G rigory Perelman did not plan to
become a mathematician. “There
was never a decision point,” he said
when we met. We were outside the
apartment building where he lives, in
Kupchino, a neighborhood of drab
high-rises. Perelman’s father, who was
an electrical engineer, encouraged his
interest in math. “He gave me logi-
cal and other math problems to think
about,” Perelman said. “He got a lot of
books for me to read. He taught me
how to play chess. He was proud of
me.” Among the books his father gave
him was a copy of “Physics for Enter-
tainment,” which had been a best-seller
in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-
thirties. In the foreword, the book’s
author describes the contents as “co-
nundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining
anecdotes, and unexpected compari-
sons,” adding, “I have quoted exten-
sively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells,
Mark Twain and other writers, because,
besides providing entertainment, the
fantastic experiments these writers de-
scribe may well serve as instructive illus-
trations at physics classes.” The book’s
topics included how to jump from a
moving car, and why, “according to the
law of buoyancy, we would never drown
in the Dead Sea.”
The notion that Russian society con-
sidered worthwhile what Perelman did
for pleasure came as a surprise. By the
time he was fourteen, he was the star
performer of a local math club. In 1982,
the year that Shing-Tung Yau won a
Fields Medal, Perelman earned a perfect
score and the gold medal at the Interna-
tional Mathematical Olympiad, in Bu-
dapest. He was friendly with his team-
mates but not close—“I had no close
friends,” he said. He was one of two or
three Jews in his grade, and he had a
passion for opera, which also set him
apart from his peers. His mother,
a math teacher at a technical college,
played the violin and began taking him to
the opera when he was six. By the time
Perelman was fifteen, he was spending
his pocket money on records. He was
thrilled to own a recording of a famous
1946 performance of “La Traviata,” fea-
turing Licia Albanese as Violetta. “Her
voice was very good,” he said.
At Leningrad University, which
Perelman entered in 1982, at the age of
sixteen, he took advanced classes in ge-
ometry and solved a problem posed by
Yuri Burago, a mathematician at the
Steklov Institute, who later became his
Ph.D. adviser. “There are a lot of stu-
dents of high ability who speak before
thinking,” Burago said. “Grisha was
different. He thought deeply. His an-
swers were always correct. He always
checked very, very carefully.” Burago
added, “He was not fast. Speed means
nothing. Math doesn’t depend on
speed. It is about deep.”
At the Steklov in the early nineties,
Perelman became an expert on the ge-
ometry of Riemannian and Alexandrov
spaces—extensions of traditional Eu-
clidean geometry—and began to publish
articles in the leading Russian and Amer-
ican mathematics journals. In 1992,
Perelman was invited to spend a semes-
ter each at New York University and
Stony Brook University. By the time he
left for the United States, that fall, the
Russian economy had collapsed. Dan
Stroock, a mathematician at M.I.T., re-
calls smuggling wads of dollars into the
country to deliver to a retired mathema-
tician at the Steklov, who, like many of
his colleagues, had become destitute.
Perelman was pleased to be in the
United States, the capital of the interna-
tional mathematics community. He
wore the same brown corduroy jacket
every day and told friends at N.Y.U.
that he lived on a diet of bread, cheese,
and milk. He liked to walk to Brooklyn,
where he had relatives and could buy
traditional Russian brown bread. Some
of his colleagues were taken aback by his
fingernails, which were several inches
long. “If they grow, why wouldn’t I let
them grow?” he would say when some-
one asked why he didn’t cut them. Once
a week, he and a young Chinese math-
ematician named Gang Tian drove to
Princeton, to attend a seminar at the In-
stitute for Advanced Study.
For several decades, the institute
and nearby Princeton University had
been centers of topological research. In
the late seventies, William Thurston, a
Princeton mathematician who liked to
test out his ideas using scissors and
construction paper, proposed a taxon-
omy for classifying manifolds of three
dimensions. He argued that, while the
manifolds could be made to take on
many different shapes, they nonethe-
less had a “preferred” geometry, just as
a piece of silk draped over a dressmak-
er’s mannequin takes on the manne-
quin’s form.
Thurston proposed that every three-
dimensional manifold could be broken
down into one or more of eight types
of component, including a spherical
type. Thurston’s theory—which became
known as the geometrization conjec-
ture—describes all possible three-dimen-
sional manifolds and is thus a powerful
generalization of the Poincaré. If it was
confirmed, then Poincaré’s conjecture
would be, too. Proving Thurston and
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006 47
Poincaré “definitely swings open doors,”
Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Har-
vard, said. The implications of the con-
jectures for other disciplines may not be
apparent for years, but for mathemati-
cians the problems are fundamental.
“This is a kind of twentieth-century Py-
thagorean theorem,” Mazur added. “It
changes the landscape.”
In 1982, Thurston won a Fields Medal
for his contributions to topology. That
year, Richard Hamilton, a mathematician
at Cornell, published a paper on an equa-
tion called the Ricci flow, which he sus-
pected could be relevant for solving Thur-
ston’s conjecture and thus the Poincaré.
Like a heat equation, which describes
how heat distributes itself evenly through
a substance—flowing from hotter to
cooler parts of a metal sheet, for exam-
ple—to create a more uniform tempera-
ture, the Ricci flow, by smoothing out
irregularities, gives manifolds a more uni-
form geometry.
Hamilton, the son of a Cincinnati
doctor, defied the math profession’s nerdy
stereotype. Brash and irreverent, he rode
horses, windsurfed, and had a succession
of girlfriends. He treated math as merely
one of life’s pleasures. At forty-nine, he
was considered a brilliant lecturer, but he
had published relatively little beyond a se-
ries of seminal articles on the Ricci flow,
and he had few graduate students. Perel-
man had read Hamilton’s papers and
went to hear him give a talk at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study. Afterward,
Perelman shyly spoke to him.
“I really wanted to ask him some-
thing,” Perelman recalled. “He was smil-
ing, and he was quite patient. He actu-
ally told me a couple of things that he
published a few years later. He did not
hesitate to tell me. Hamilton’s openness
and generosity—it really attracted me. I
can’t say that most mathematicians act
like that.
“I was working on different things,
though occasionally I would think about
the Ricci flow,” Perelman added. “You
didn’t have to be a great mathematician to
see that this would be useful for geome-
trization. I felt I didn’t know very much.
I kept asking questions.”
S hing-Tung Yau was also asking
Hamilton questions about the Ricci
flow. Yau and Hamilton had met in the
seventies, and had become close, de-
48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006
spite considerable differences in tem-
perament and background. A mathe-
matician at the University of California
at San Diego who knows both men
called them “the mathematical loves of
each other’s lives.”
Yau’s family moved to Hong Kong
from mainland China in 1949, when
he was five months old, along with
hundreds of thousands of other refu-
gees fleeing Mao’s armies. The previ-
ous year, his father, a relief worker for
the United Nations, had lost most of
the family’s savings in a series of failed
ventures. In Hong Kong, to support
his wife and eight children, he tutored
college students in classical Chinese
literature and philosophy.
When Yau was fourteen, his father
died of kidney cancer, leaving his
mother dependent on handouts from
Christian missionaries and whatever
small sums she earned from selling
handicrafts. Until then, Yau had been
an indifferent student. But he began to
devote himself to schoolwork, tutoring
other students in math to make money.
“Part of the thing that drives Yau is
that he sees his own life as being his fa-
ther’s revenge,” said Dan Stroock, the
M.I.T. mathematician, who has known
Yau for twenty years. “Yau’s father was
like the Talmudist whose children are
starving.”
Yau studied math at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, where he
attracted the attention of Shiing-Shen
Chern, the preëminent Chinese math-
ematician, who helped him win a
scholarship to the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley. Chern was the au-
thor of a famous theorem combining
topology and geometry. He spent
most of his career in the United States,
at Berkeley. He made frequent visits
to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, later,
China, where he was a revered symbol
of Chinese intellectual achievement,
to promote the study of math and
science.
In 1969, Yau started graduate
school at Berkeley, enrolling in seven
graduate courses each term and audit-
ing several others. He sent half of his
scholarship money back to his mother
in China and impressed his professors
with his tenacity. He was obliged to
share credit for his first major result
when he learned that two other math-
ematicians were working on the same
problem. In 1976, he proved a twenty-
year-old conjecture pertaining to a
type of manifold that is now crucial to
string theory. A French mathemati-
cian had formulated a proof of the
problem, which is known as Calabi’s
conjecture, but Yau’s, because it was
more general, was more powerful.
(Physicists now refer to Calabi-Yau
manifolds.) “He was not so much
thinking up some original way of look-
ing at a subject but solving extremely
hard technical problems that at the
time only he could solve, by sheer in-
tellect and force of will,” Phillip
Griffiths, a geometer and a former di-
rector of the Institute for Advanced
Study, said.
In 1980, when Yau was thirty, he
became one of the youngest mathema-
ticians ever to be appointed to the per-
manent faculty of the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study, and he began to attract
talented students. He won a Fields
Medal two years later, the first Chinese
ever to do so. By this time, Chern was
seventy years old and on the verge of
retirement. According to a relative of
Chern’s, “Yau decided that he was
going to be the next famous Chinese
mathematician and that it was time for
Chern to step down.”
Harvard had been trying to recruit
Yau, and when, in 1983, it was about
to make him a second offer Phillip
Griffiths told the dean of faculty a ver-
sion of a story from “The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms,” a Chinese clas-
sic. In the third century A.D., a Chi-
nese warlord dreamed of creating an
empire, but the most brilliant general
in China was working for a rival.
Three times, the warlord went to his
enemy’s kingdom to seek out the gen-
eral. Impressed, the general agreed to
join him, and together they succeeded
in founding a dynasty. Taking the
hint, the dean flew to Philadelphia,
where Yau lived at the time, to make
him an offer. Even so, Yau turned
down the job. Finally, in 1987, he
agreed to go to Harvard.
 Yau’s entrepreneurial drive ex-
tended to collaborations with col-
leagues and students, and, in addition
to conducting his own research, he
began organizing seminars. He fre-
quently allied himself with brilliantly
inventive mathematicians, including
Richard Schoen and William Meeks.
But Yau was especially impressed by
Hamilton, as much for his swagger as
for his imagination. “I can have fun
with Hamilton,” Yau told us during
the string-theory conference in Bei-
jing. “I can go swimming with him. I
go out with him and his girlfriends
and all that.” Yau was convinced that
Hamilton could use the Ricci-flow
equation to solve the Poincaré and
Thurston conjectures, and he urged
him to focus on the problems. “Meet-
ing Yau changed his mathematical
life,” a friend of both mathematicians
said of Hamilton. “This was the first
time he had been on to something ex-
tremely big. Talking to Yau gave him
courage and direction.”
Yau believed that if he could help
solve the Poincaré it would be a vic-
tory not just for him but also for
China. In the mid-nineties, Yau and
several other Chinese scholars began “I’m a local craftsperson—I make money.”
meeting with President Jiang Zemin
to discuss how to rebuild the country’s • •
scientific institutions, which had been
largely destroyed during the Cultural
Revolution. Chinese universities were to them, but I was half serious. I said sible to achieve uniform geometry.
in dire condition. According to Steve the whole country should learn from Perelman realized that a paper he had
Smale, who won a Fields for proving Hamilton.” written on Alexandrov spaces might
the Poincaré in higher dimensions, help Hamilton prove Thurston’s con-
and who, after retiring from Berkeley,
taught in Hong Kong, Peking Uni-
versity had “halls filled with the smell
G rigory Perelman was learning
from Hamilton already. In 1993,
he began a two-year fellowship at
jecture—and the Poin­caré­—once
Hamilton solved the cigar problem.
“At some point, I asked Hamilton if
of urine, one common room, one Berkeley. While he was there, Hamil- he knew a certain collapsing result
office for all the assistant professors,” ton gave several talks on campus, and that I had proved but not published—
and paid its faculty wretchedly low in one he mentioned that he was which turned out to be very useful,”
salaries. Yau persuaded a Hong Kong working on the Poincaré. Hamilton’s Perelman said. “Later, I realized that
real-estate mogul to help finance a Ricci-flow strategy was extremely he didn’t understand what I was talk-
mathematics institute at the Chinese technical and tricky to execute. Af- ing about.” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T.,
Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and ter one of his talks at Berkeley, he said, “Perelman may have learned stuff
to endow a Fields-style medal for told Perelman about his biggest ob- from Yau and Hamilton, but, at the
Chinese mathematicians under the stacle. As a space is smoothed under time, they were not learning from
age of forty-five. On his trips to the Ricci flow, some regions deform him.”
China, Yau touted Hamilton and into what mathematicians refer to as By the end of his first year at Berke-
their joint work on the Ricci flow and “singularities.” Some regions, called ley, Perelman had written several strik-
the Poincaré as a model for young “necks,” become attenuated areas of ingly original papers. He was asked to
Chinese mathematicians. As he put it infinite density. More troubling to give a lecture at the 1994 I.M.U. con-
in Beijing, “They always say that the Hamilton was a kind of singularity he gress, in Zurich, and invited to apply
whole country should learn from Mao called the “cigar.” If cigars formed, for jobs at Stanford, Princeton, the In-
or some big heroes. So I made a joke Hamilton worried, it might be impos- stitute for Advanced Study, and the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006 49
SKETCHBOOK BY WALTON FORD A full third of Shelter Island, at the eastern end of Long Island, is given over to the Mashomack
 University of Tel Aviv. Like Yau,
Perelman was a formidable problem
solver. Instead of spending years con-
structing an intricate theoretical frame-
work, or defining new areas of re-
search, he focussed on obtaining par­-
ticular results. According to Mikhail
Gromov, a renowned Russian geome-
ter who has collaborated with Perel-
man, he had been trying to overcome a
technical difficulty relating to Alexan-
drov spaces and had apparently been
stumped. “He couldn’t do it,” Gromov
said. “It was hopeless.”
Perelman told us that he liked to
work on several problems at once. At
Berkeley, however, he found himself
returning again and again to Hamil-
ton’s Ricci-flow equation and the prob-
lem that Hamilton thought he could
solve with it. Some of Perelman’s
friends noticed that he was becoming
more and more ascetic. Visitors from
St. Petersburg who stayed in his apart-
ment were struck by how sparsely fur-
nished it was. Others worried that he
seemed to want to reduce life to a set
of rigid axioms. When a member of a
hiring committee at Stanford asked
him for a C.V. to include with requests
for letters of recommendation, Perel-
man balked. “If they know my work,
they don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If
they need my C.V., they don’t know
my work.”
Ultimately, he received several job
offers. But he declined them all, and in
the summer of 1995 returned to St.
Petersburg, to his old job at the Stek-
lov Institute, where he was paid less
than a hundred dollars a month. (He
told a friend that he had saved enough
money in the United States to live on
for the rest of his life.) His father had
moved to Israel two years earlier, and
his younger sister was planning to join
him there after she finished college.
His mother, however, had decided to
remain in St. Petersburg, and Perel-
man moved in with her. “I realize that
in Russia I work better,” he told col-
leagues at the Steklov.
At twenty-nine, Perelman was
firmly established as a mathematician
PAUL KASMIN GALLERY, NYC.

and yet largely unburdened by profes-

Preserve, which has protected wetlands and ten miles of natural coast.
sional responsibilities. He was free to
pursue whatever problems he wanted
to, and he knew that his work, should
he choose to publish it, would be
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006 51

“Over here, Billingsley.”
• •
shown serious consideration. Yakov
Eliashberg, a mathematician at Stan-
ford who knew Perelman at Berkeley,
thinks that Perelman returned to Rus-
sia in order to work on the Poincaré.
“Why not?” Perelman said when we
asked whether Eliashberg’s hunch was
correct.
The Internet made it possible for
Perelman to work alone while continu-
ing to tap a common pool of knowl-
edge. Perelman searched Hamilton’s
papers for clues to his thinking and
gave several seminars on his work. “He
didn’t need any help,” Gromov said.
“He likes to be alone. He reminds me
of Newton—this obsession with an
idea, working by yourself, the disregard
for other people’s opinion. Newton was
more obnoxious. Perelman is nicer, but
very obsessed.”
In 1995, Hamilton published a
paper in which he discussed a few of his
ideas for completing a proof of the
Poincaré. Reading the paper, Perelman
realized that Hamilton had made no
progress on overcoming his obstacles—
the necks and the cigars. “I hadn’t seen
any evidence of progress after early
1992,” Perelman told us. “Maybe he
got stuck even earlier.” However, Perel-
52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006
man thought he saw a way around the
impasse. In 1996, he wrote Hamilton a
long letter outlining his notion, in the
hope of collaborating. “He did not an-
swer,” Perelman said. “So I decided to
work alone.”
Y au had no idea that Hamilton’s
work on the Poincaré had stalled.
He was increasingly anxious about his
own standing in the mathematics pro-
fession, particularly in China, where,
he worried, a younger scholar could try
to supplant him as Chern’s heir. More
than a decade had passed since Yau
had proved his last major result, though
he continued to publish prolifically.
“Yau wants to be the king of geome-
try,” Michael Anderson, a geometer at
Stony Brook, said. “He believes that
everything should issue from him, that
he should have oversight. He doesn’t
like people encroaching on his terri-
tory.” Determined to retain control
over his field, Yau pushed his students
to tackle big problems. At Harvard, he
ran a notoriously tough seminar on
differential geometry, which met for
three hours at a time three times a
week. Each student was assigned a re-
cently published proof and asked to re-
construct it, fixing any errors and filling
in gaps. Yau believed that a mathema-
tician has an obligation to be explicit,
and impressed on his students the im-
portance of step-by-step rigor.
There are two ways to get credit for
an original contribution in mathemat-
ics. The first is to produce an original
proof. The second is to identify a sig­
nificant gap in someone else’s proof
and supply the missing chunk. How-
ever, only true mathematical gaps—
missing or mistaken arguments—can
be the basis for a claim of originality.
Filling in gaps in exposition—shortcuts
and abbreviations used to make a proof
more efficient—does not count. When,
in 1993, Andrew Wiles revealed that a
gap had been found in his proof of Fer-
mat’s last theorem, the problem be-
came fair game for anyone, until, the
following year, Wiles fixed the error.
Most mathematicians would agree
that, by contrast, if a proof ’s implicit
steps can be made explicit by an expert,
then the gap is merely one of exposi-
tion, and the proof should be consid-
ered complete and correct.
Occasionally, the difference be-
tween a mathematical gap and a gap in
exposition can be hard to discern. On
at least one occasion, Yau and his stu-
dents have seemed to confuse the two,
making claims of originality that other
mathematicians believe are unwar-
ranted. In 1996, a young geometer at
Berkeley named Alexander Givental
had proved a mathematical conjec-
ture about mirror symmetry, a concept
that is fundamental to string theory.
Though other mathematicians found
Givental’s proof hard to follow, they
were optimistic that he had solved the
problem. As one geometer put it, “No-
body at the time said it was incomplete
and incorrect.”
In the fall of 1997, Kefeng Liu, a
former student of Yau’s who taught at
Stanford, gave a talk at Harvard on
mirror symmetry. According to two
geometers in the audience, Liu pro-
ceeded to present a proof strikingly
similar to Givental’s, describing it as a
paper that he had co-authored with
Yau and another student of Yau’s.
“Liu mentioned Givental but only as
one of a long list of people who had
contributed to the field,” one of the
geometers said. (Liu maintains that
his proof was significantly different ing speakers for the congress was Yau’s more than a friend. He is a hero. He is
from Givental’s.) most successful student, Gang Tian, so original. We were working to finish
Around the same time, Givental re- who had been at N.Y.U. with Perelman our proof. Hamilton worked on it for
ceived an e-mail signed by Yau and his and was now a professor at M.I.T. The twenty-five years. You work, you get
collaborators, explaining that they had host committee in Beijing also asked tired. He probably got a little tired—
found his arguments impossible to fol- Tian to give a plenary address. and you want to take a rest.”
low and his notation baffling, and had Yau was caught by surprise. In Then, on November 12, 2002, Yau
come up with a proof of their own. March, 2000, he had published a survey received an e-mail message from a
They praised Givental for his “brilliant of recent research in his field studded Russian mathematician whose name
idea” and wrote, “In the final version of with glowing references to Tian and to didn’t immediately register. “May I
our paper your important contribution their joint projects. He retaliated by or- bring to your attention my paper,” the
will be acknowledged.” ganizing his first conference on string e-mail said.
A few weeks later, the paper, “Mir- theory, which opened in Beijing a few
ror Principle I,” appeared in the Asian
Journal of Mathematics, which is co-
edited by Yau. In it, Yau and his co-
days before the math congress began, in
late August, 2002. He persuaded Ste-
phen Hawking and several Nobel lau-
O n November 11th, Perelman had
posted a thirty-nine-page paper
entitled “The Entropy Formula for the
authors describe their result as “the first reates to attend, and for days the Chi- Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applica-
complete proof ” of the mirror conjec- nese newspapers were full of pictures of tions,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by
ture. They mention Givental’s work famous scientists. Yau even managed to mathematicians to post preprints—ar-
only in passing. “Unfortunately,” they arrange for his group to have an audi- ticles awaiting publication in refereed
write, his proof, “which has been read ence with Jiang Zemin. A mathemati- journals. He then e-mailed an abstract
by many prominent experts, is incom- cian who helped organize the math of his paper to a dozen mathematicians
plete.” However, they did not identify congress recalls that along the highway in the United States—including Ham-
a specific mathematical gap. between Beijing and the airport there ilton, Tian, and Yau—none of whom
Givental was taken aback. “I wanted were “billboards with pictures of Ste- had heard from him for years. In the
to know what their objection was,” he phen Hawking plastered everywhere.” abstract, he explained that he had writ-
told us. “Not to expose them or defend That summer, Yau wasn’t thinking ten “a sketch of an eclectic proof ” of
myself.” In March, 1998, he published much about the Poincaré. He had the geometrization conjecture.
a paper that included a three-page confidence in Hamilton, despite his Perelman had not mentioned the
footnote in which he pointed out a slow pace. “Hamilton is a very good proof or shown it to anyone. “I didn’t
number of similarities between Yau’s friend,” Yau told us in Beijing. “He is have any friends with whom I could
proof and his own. Several months
later, a young mathematician at the
University of Chicago who was asked
by senior colleagues to investigate the
dispute concluded that Givental’s proof
was complete. Yau says that he had
been working on the proof for years
with his students and that they achieved
their result independently of Givental.
“We had our own ideas, and we wrote
them up,” he says.
Around this time, Yau had his first
serious conflict with Chern and the Chi-
nese mathematical establishment. For
years, Chern had been hoping to bring
the I.M.U.’s congress to Beijing. Ac-
cording to several mathematicians who
were active in the I.M.U. at the time,
Yau made an eleventh-hour effort to
have the congress take place in Hong
Kong instead. But he failed to persuade
a sufficient number of colleagues to go
along with his proposal, and the I.M.U.
ultimately decided to hold the 2002 con-
gress in Beijing. (Yau denies that he tried
to bring the congress to Hong Kong.)
Among the delegates the I.M.U. ap-
pointed to a group that would be choos-
discuss this,” he said in St. Petersburg.
“I didn’t want to discuss my work with
someone I didn’t trust.” Andrew Wiles
had also kept the fact that he was work-
ing on Fermat’s last theorem a secret,
but he had had a colleague vet the proof
before making it public. Perelman, by
casually posting a proof on the Internet
of one of the most famous problems in
mathematics, was not just flouting aca-
demic convention but taking a consid-
erable risk. If the proof was flawed, he
would be publicly humiliated, and there
would be no way to prevent another
mathematician from fixing any errors
and claiming victory. But Perelman said
he was not particularly concerned. “My
reasoning was: if I made an error and
someone used my work to construct a
correct proof I would be pleased,” he
said. “I never set out to be the sole solver
of the Poincaré.”
Gang Tian was in his office at
M.I.T. when he received Perelman’s
e-mail. He and Perelman had been
friendly in 1992, when they were both
at N.Y.U. and had attended the same
weekly math seminar in Princeton. “I
immediately realized its importance,”
Tian said of Perelman’s paper. Tian
began to read the paper and discuss
it with colleagues, who were equally
enthusiastic.
On November 19th, Vitali Kapo-
vitch, a geometer, sent Perelman an
e-mail:
Hi Grisha, Sorry to bother you but a lot
of people are asking me about your preprint
“The entropy formula for the Ricci . . .” Do
I understand it correctly that while you can-
not yet do all the steps in the Hamilton
program you can do enough so that using
some collapsing results you can prove ge-
ometrization? Vitali.
Perelman’s response, the next day,
was terse: “That’s correct. Grisha.”
In fact, what Perelman had posted
on the Internet was only the first in-
stallment of his proof. But it was
sufficient for mathematicians to see
that he had figured out how to solve the
Poincaré. Barry Mazur, the Harvard
mathematician, uses the image of a
dented fender to describe Perelman’s
achievement: “Suppose your car has a
dented fender and you call a mechanic
to ask how to smooth it out. The me-
chanic would have a hard time telling
you what to do over the phone. You
would have to bring the car into the ga-
54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006
rage for him to examine. Then he could
tell you where to give it a few knocks.
What Hamilton introduced and Perel-
man completed is a procedure that is
independent of the particularities of the
blemish. If you apply the Ricci flow to
a 3-D space, it will begin to undent
it and smooth it out. The mechanic
would not need to even see the car—
just apply the equation.” Perelman
proved that the “cigars” that had trou-
bled Hamilton could not actually occur,
and he showed that the “neck” problem
could be solved by performing an intri-
cate sequence of mathematical surger-
ies: cutting out singularities and patch-
ing up the raw edges. “Now we have a
procedure to smooth things and, at
crucial points, control the breaks,”
Mazur said.
Tian wrote to Perelman, asking him
to lecture on his paper at M.I.T. Col-
leagues at Princeton and Stony Brook
extended similar invitations. Perelman
accepted them all and was booked for a
month of lectures beginning in April,
2003. “Why not?” he told us with a
shrug. Speaking of mathematicians
generally, Fedor Nazarov, a mathema-
tician at Michigan State University,
said, “After you’ve solved a problem,
you have a great urge to talk about it.”
H amilton and Yau were stunned by
Perelman’s announcement. “We
felt that nobody else would be able to
discover the solution,” Yau told us in
Beijing. “But then, in 2002, Perelman
said that he published something. He
basically did a shortcut without doing
all the detailed estimates that we did.”
Moreover, Yau complained, Perelman’s
proof “was written in such a messy way
that we didn’t understand.”
Perelman’s April lecture tour was
treated by mathematicians and by the
press as a major event. Among the au-
dience at his talk at Princeton were
John Ball, Andrew Wiles, John Forbes
Nash, Jr., who had proved the Riemann­
ian embedding theorem, and John
Conway, the inventor of the cellular
automaton game Life. To the astonish-
ment of many in the audience, Perel-
man said nothing about the Poincaré.
“Here is a guy who proved a world-fa-
mous theorem and didn’t even mention
it,” Frank Quinn, a mathematician at
Virginia Tech, said. “He stated some
key points and special properties, and
then answered questions. He was es-
tablishing credibility. If he had beaten
his chest and said, ‘I solved it,’ he would
have got a huge amount of resistance.”
He added, “People were expecting a
strange sight. Perelman was much more
normal than they expected.”
To Perelman’s disappointment,
Hamilton did not attend that lecture or
the next ones, at Stony Brook. “I’m a
disciple of Hamilton’s, though I haven’t
received his authorization,” Perelman
told us. But John Morgan, at Colum-
bia, where Hamilton now taught, was
in the audience at Stony Brook, and
after a lecture he invited Perelman to
speak at Columbia. Perelman, hoping
to see Hamilton, agreed. The lecture
took place on a Saturday morning. Ham­
ilton showed up late and asked no ques-
tions during either the long discussion
session that followed the talk or the
lunch after that. “I had the impression
he had read only the first part of my
paper,” Perelman said.
In the April 18, 2003, issue of Sci-
ence, Yau was featured in an article
about Perelman’s proof: “Many ex-
perts, although not all, seem convinced
that Perelman has stubbed out the ci-
gars and tamed the narrow necks. But
they are less confident that he can
control the number of surgeries. That
could prove a fatal flaw, Yau warns,
noting that many other attempted
proofs of the Poincaré conjecture have
stumbled over similar missing steps.”
Proofs should be treated with skepti-
cism until mathematicians have had a
chance to review them thoroughly,
Yau told us. Until then, he said, “it’s
not math—it’s religion.”
By mid-July, Perelman had posted
the final two installments of his proof
on the Internet, and mathematicians
had begun the work of formal explica-
tion, painstakingly retracing his steps.
In the United States, at least two teams
of experts had assigned themselves this
task: Gang Tian (Yau’s rival) and John
Morgan; and a pair of researchers at the
University of Michigan. Both projects
were supported by the Clay Institute,
which planned to publish Tian and
Morgan’s work as a book. The book, in
addition to providing other mathema-
ticians with a guide to Perelman’s logic,
would allow him to be considered for
the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize
for solving the Poincaré. (To be eligi-
ble, a proof must be published in a peer-
reviewed venue and withstand two
years of scrutiny by the mathematical
community.)
On September 10, 2004, more than
a year after Perelman returned to St. Pe-
tersburg, he received a long e-mail from
Tian, who said that he had just attended
a two-week workshop at Princeton de-
voted to Perelman’s proof. “I think that
we have understood the whole paper,”
Tian wrote. “It is all right.”
Perelman did not write back. As he
explained to us, “I didn’t worry too
much myself. This was a famous prob-
lem. Some people needed time to get
accustomed to the fact that this is no
longer a conjecture. I personally de-
cided for myself that it was right for me
to stay away from verification and not
to participate in all these meetings. It is
important for me that I don’t influence
this process.”
In July of that year, the National
Science Foundation had given nearly a
million dollars in grants to Yau, Ham-
ilton, and several students of Yau’s to
study and apply Perelman’s “break-
through.” An entire branch of mathe-
matics had grown up around efforts
to solve the Poincaré, and now that
branch appeared at risk of becoming
obsolete. Michael Freedman, who won
a Fields for proving the Poincaré con-
jecture for the fourth dimension, told
the Times that Perelman’s proof was a
“small sorrow for this particular branch
of topology.” Yuri Burago said, “It kills
the field. After this is done, many
mathematicians will move to other
branches of mathematics.”
F ive months later, Chern died, and
Yau’s efforts to insure that he­—not
Tian—was recognized as his successor
turned vicious. “It’s all about their pri-
macy in China and their leadership
among the expatriate Chinese,” Joseph
“Great, but how is he in bed?”
• •
Kohn, a former chairman of the Prince­
ton mathematics department, said.
“Yau’s not jealous of Tian’s mathemat-
ics, but he’s jealous of his power back
in China.”
Though Yau had not spent more
than a few months at a time on main-
land China since he was an infant, he
was convinced that his status as the
only Chinese Fields Medal winner
should make him Chern’s successor. In
a speech he gave at Zhejiang Univer-
sity, in Hangzhou, during the summer
of 2004, Yau reminded his listeners of
his Chinese roots. “When I stepped out
from the airplane, I touched the soil of
Beijing and felt great joy to be in my
mother country,” he said. “I am proud
to say that when I was awarded the
Fields Medal in mathematics, I held no
passport of any country and should cer-
tainly be considered Chinese.”
The following summer, Yau re-
turned to China and, in a series of in-
terviews with Chinese reporters, at-
tacked Tian and the mathematicians at
Peking University. In an article pub-
lished in a Beijing science newspaper,
which ran under the headline “SHING-
TUNG YAU IS SLAMMING ACADEMIC
CORRUPTION IN CHINA,” Yau called
Tian “a complete mess.” He accused
him of holding multiple professor-
ships and of collecting a hundred and
twenty-five thousand dollars for a few
months’ work at a Chinese university,
while students were living on a hun-
dred dollars a month. He also charged
Tian with shoddy scholarship and pla-
giarism, and with intimidating his
graduate students into letting him
add his name to their papers. “Since I
promoted him all the way to his aca-
demic fame today, I should also take
responsibility for his improper behav-
ior,” Yau was quoted as saying to a re-
porter, explaining why he felt obliged
to speak out.
In another interview, Yau described
how the Fields committee had passed
Tian over in 1988 and how he had
lobbied on Tian’s behalf with various
prize committees, including one at the
National Science Foundation, which
awarded Tian five hundred thousand
dollars in 1994.
Tian was appalled by Yau’s attacks,
but he felt that, as Yau’s former stu-
dent, there was little he could do about
them. “His accusations were base-
less,” Tian told us. But, he added, “I
have deep roots in Chinese culture. A
teacher is a teacher. There is respect. It
is very hard for me to think of anything
to do.”
While Yau was in China, he visited
Xi-Ping Zhu, a protégé of his who was
now chairman of the mathematics de-
partment at Sun Yat-sen University.
In the spring of 2003, after Perelman
completed his lecture tour in the United
States, Yau had recruited Zhu and an-
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006 55
other student, Huai-Dong Cao, a pro-
fessor at Lehigh University, to under-
take an explication of Perelman’s proof.
Zhu and Cao had studied the Ricci
flow under Yau, who considered Zhu,
in particular, to be a mathematician of
exceptional promise. “We have to figure
out whether Perelman’s paper holds to-
gether,” Yau told them. Yau arranged
for Zhu to spend the 2005-06 academic
year at Harvard, where he gave a semi-
nar on Perelman’s proof and continued
to work on his paper with Cao.
O n April 13th of this year, the
thirty-one mathematicians on the
editorial board of the Asian Journal of
Mathematics received a brief e-mail
from Yau and the journal’s co-editor
informing them that they had three
days to comment on a paper by Xi-
Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled
“The Hamilton-Perelman Theory of
Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geom-
etrization Conjectures,” which Yau
planned to publish in the journal. The
e-mail did not include a copy of the
paper, reports from referees, or an ab-
stract. At least one board member
asked to see the paper but was told that
it was not available. On April 16th,
Cao received a message from Yau tell-
ing him that the paper had been ac-
cepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract
was posted on the journal’s Web site.
A month later, Yau had lunch in
Cambridge with Jim Carlson, the pres-
“Call me ‘dude’ again! I dare you! I double-dare you, Alexander!
Call me ‘dude’ one more goddam time!”
ident of the Clay Institute. He told
Carlson that he wanted to trade a copy
of Zhu and Cao’s paper for a copy of
Tian and Morgan’s book manuscript.
Yau told us he was worried that Tian
would try to steal from Zhu and Cao’s
work, and he wanted to give each party
simultaneous access to what the other
had written. “I had a lunch with Carl-
son to request to exchange both manu-
scripts to make sure that nobody can
copy the other,” Yau said. Carlson de-
murred, explaining that the Clay Insti-
tute had not yet received Tian and
Morgan’s complete manuscript.
By the end of the following week,
the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the
A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A
Complete Proof of the Poincaré and
Geometrization Conjectures: Applica-
tion of the Hamilton-Perelman The-
ory of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract
had also been revised. A new sentence
explained, “This proof should be con-
sidered as the crowning achievement
of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of
Ricci flow.”
Zhu and Cao’s paper was more than
three hundred pages long and filled the
A.J.M.’s entire June issue. The bulk of
the paper is devoted to reconstructing
many of Hamilton’s Ricci-flow re-
sults—including results that Perelman
had made use of in his proof—and
much of Perelman’s proof of the Poin-
caré. In their introduction, Zhu and
Cao credit Perelman with having
“brought in fresh new ideas to figure
out important steps to overcome the
main obstacles that remained in the
program of Hamilton.” However, they
write, they were obliged to “substitute
several key arguments of Perelman by
new approaches based on our study,
because we were unable to comprehend
these original arguments of Perelman
which are essential to the completion
of the geometrization program.” Math-
ematicians familiar with Perelman’s
proof disputed the idea that Zhu and
Cao had contributed significant new
approaches to the Poincaré. “Perelman
already did it and what he did was
complete and correct,” John Morgan
said. “I don’t see that they did anything
different.”
By early June, Yau had begun to
promote the proof publicly. On June
3rd, at his mathematics institute in
Beijing, he held a press conference.
The acting director of the mathematics
institute, attempting to explain the rel-
ative contributions of the different
mathematicians who had worked on
the Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contrib-
uted over fifty per cent; the Russian,
Perelman, about twenty-five per cent;
and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et
al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently,
simple addition can sometimes trip up
even a mathematician.) Yau added,
“Given the significance of the Poin-
caré, that Chinese mathematicians
played a thirty-per-cent role is by no
means easy. It is a very important
contribution.”
On June 12th, the week before Yau’s
conference on string theory opened in
Beijing, the South China Morning Post
reported, “Mainland mathematicians
who helped crack a ‘millennium math
problem’ will present the methodology
and findings to physicist Stephen Hawk-
ing. . . . Yau Shing-Tung, who orga-
nized Professor Hawking’s visit and is
also Professor Cao’s teacher, said yester-
day he would present the findings to
Professor Hawking because he believed
the knowledge would help his research
into the formation of black holes.”
On the morning of his lecture in Bei-
jing, Yau told us, “We want our contri-
bution understood. And this is also a
strategy to encourage Zhu, who is in
China and who has done really spectac-
ular work. I mean, important work with
a century-long problem, which will
probably have another few century-long
implications. If you can attach your
name in any way, it is a contribution.”
E. T. Bell, the author of “Men of
Mathematics,” a witty history of
the discipline published in 1937, once
lamented “the squabbles over priority
which disfigure scientific history.” But in
the days before e-mail, blogs, and Web
sites, a certain decorum usually pre-
vailed. In 1881, Poincaré, who was then
at the University of Caen, had an alter-
cation with a German mathematician in
Leipzig named Felix Klein. Poincaré
had published several papers in which he
labelled certain functions “Fuchsian,”
after another mathematician. Klein
wrote to Poincaré, pointing out that he
and others had done significant work on
these functions, too. An exchange of po-
lite letters between Leipzig and Caen
ensued. Poincaré’s last word on the sub-
ject was a quote from Goethe’s “Faust”:
“Name ist Schall und Rauch.” Loosely
translated, that corresponds to Shake-
speare’s “What’s in a name?”
This, essentially, is what Yau’s
friends are asking themselves. “I find
myself getting annoyed with Yau that
he seems to feel the need for more
kudos,” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said.
“This is a guy who did magnificent
things, for which he was magnificently
rewarded. He won every prize to be
won. I find it a little mean of him to
seem to be trying to get a share of this
as well.” Stroock pointed out that,
twenty-five years ago, Yau was in a sit-
uation very similar to the one Perelman
is in today. His most famous result, on
Calabi-Yau manifolds, was hugely im-
portant for theoretical physics. “Calabi
outlined a program,” Stroock said. “In
a real sense, Yau was Calabi’s Perel-
man. Now he’s on the other side. He’s
had no compunction at all in taking the
lion’s share of credit for Calabi-Yau.
And now he seems to be resenting
Perelman getting credit for completing
Hamilton’s program. I don’t know if
the analogy has ever occurred to him.”
Mathematics, more than many
oth­er fields, depends on collaboration.
Most problems require the insights of
several mathematicians in order to be
solved, and the profession has evolved
a standard for crediting individual con-
tributions that is as stringent as the
rules governing math itself. As Perel-
man put it, “If everyone is honest, it is
natural to share ideas.” Many mathe-
maticians view Yau’s conduct over the
Poincaré as a violation of this basic
ethic, and worry about the damage it
has caused the profession. “Politics,
power, and control have no legitimate
role in our community, and they
threaten the integrity of our field,”
Phillip Griffiths said.
P erelman likes to attend opera per-
formances at the Mariinsky The-
atre, in St. Petersburg. Sitting high up
in the back of the house, he can’t make
out the singers’ expressions or see the
details of their costumes. But he cares
only about the sound of their voices, and
he says that the acoustics are better
where he sits than anywhere else in the
theatre. Perelman views the mathemat-
ics community—and much of the larger
world—from a similar remove.
Before we arrived in St. Petersburg,
on June 23rd, we had sent several mes-
sages to his e-mail address at the Steklov
Institute, hoping to arrange a meeting,
but he had not replied. We took a taxi to
his apartment building and, reluctant to
intrude on his privacy, left a book—a
collection of John Nash’s papers—in his
mailbox, along with a card saying that
we would be sitting on a bench in a
nearby playground the following after-
noon. The next day, after Perelman
failed to appear, we left a box of pearl tea
and a note describing some of the ques-
tions we hoped to discuss with him. We
repeated this ritual a third time. Finally,
believing that Perelman was out of town,
we pressed the buzzer for his apartment,
hoping at least to speak with his mother.
A woman answered and let us inside.
Perelman met us in the dimly lit hallway
of the apartment. It turned out that he
had not checked his Steklov e-mail ad-
dress for months, and had not looked in
his mailbox all week. He had no idea
who we were.
We arranged to meet at ten the fol-
lowing morning on Nevsky Prospekt.
From there, Perelman, dressed in a sports
coat and loafers, took us on a four-hour
walking tour of the city, commenting on
every building and vista. After that, we
all went to a vocal competition at the St.
Petersburg Conservatory, which lasted
for five hours. Perelman repeatedly said
that he had retired from the mathemat-
ics community and no longer considered
himself a professional mathematician.
He mentioned a dispute that he had had
years earlier with a collaborator over how
to credit the author of a particular proof,
and said that he was dismayed by the dis-
cipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who
break ethical standards who are regarded
as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me
who are isolated.” We asked him whether
he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper. “It is
not clear to me what new contribution
did they make,” he said. “Apparently,
Zhu did not quite understand the argu-
ment and reworked it.” As for Yau,
Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged.
Other people do worse. Of course, there
are many mathematicians who are more
or less honest. But almost all of them are
conformists. They are more or less hon-
est, but they tolerate those who are not
honest.”
The prospect of being awarded a
Fields Medal had forced him to make a
complete break with his profession. “As
long as I was not conspicuous, I had a
choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to
make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the
math community’s lack of integrity—
“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be
treated as a pet. Now, when I become a
very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a
pet and say nothing. That is why I had
to quit.” We asked Perelman whether,
by refusing the Fields and withdrawing
from his profession, he was eliminating
any possibility of influencing the disci-
pline. “I am not a politician!” he replied,
angrily. Perelman would not say whether
his objection to awards extended to the
Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize. “I’m
not going to decide whether to accept
the prize until it is offered,” he said.
Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geom-
eter, said that he understood Perelman’s
logic: “To do great work, you have to
have a pure mind. You can think only
about the mathematics. Everything else
is human weakness. Accepting prizes is
showing weakness.” Others might view
Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as
arrogant, Gromov said, but his princi-
ples are admirable. “The ideal scientist
does science and cares about nothing
else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal.
Now, I don’t think he really lives on this
ideal plane. But he wants to.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2006 57